I've just been to Malawi. Yeah, I know, I'm amazing. But as well as winning dozens of friends, experiencing a new culture and continuing to grind a colonial footprint into the face of a continent, I also heard a lot of Rage Against the Machine.

No doubt this news would cheer Zack de la Rocha no end, his music seemingly the anthem for a region ready to throw off the shackles of the New World Order (I associate this band so closely with the late 90s, I feel it's only appropriate to use political terminology from that time too). Sadly, without exception, his records were played by white people - almost all of them British.

Still, if Zack were to put aside that particular disappointment there is still an uplifting message he can draw from my experience. It is the following: Killing in the Name is this year's unlikely party anthem.

I was never particularly convinced of the song's merits when it was first released, as it was permanently associated in my mind with schoolkids scrawling "f**k you I won't do what you tell me" in ballpoint on their hessian satchels (and they probably used the asterisks too). But at the end of a Mark Ronson DJ set at Glasto it appeared pure genius, especially as it sent a tentful of studied hiphop heads into a bout of moshtalgia. When I saw DJ Mehdi finish at Barcelona's Razmatazz with the same tune, the effect was the same. And then, at Malawi's Lake of Stars festival no fewer that four different DJs crammed it into their sets, without exception getting a big response from a mixed crowd of Brits, South Africans and locals. Someone even played a lounge version and that stormed it too.

Why is that? Sure there's likely to be some nostalgia involved; crowds of twentysomethings recalling the song from their youth and all the hormonal shivers it inspired. But there is also something about this rap rock standard that works as a dance tune; the crescendos, the breakdowns, the looping hooks. That the grungy power chords are not too dissimilar from those that feature in the currently popular electro sounds of Ed Banger acts like Justice and Sebastian (who has, in fact, remixed Killing to make it even grungier) probably doesn't hurt either.